I just saw some of the videos online and they're truly shocking. It's very disheartening that a minority of individuals have so drastically reduced the quality of life in so many major American cities.
Ever since I returned from my trip to Japan earlier this year I've been lamenting why we can't have nice things in this country. This is clearly one of the reasons, although certainly not the only one. I guess I question whether or not I'm a bad person for feeling such resentment towards the minority of bad apples in this country who wreak such disproportionate chaos.
There's no way that anyone can attribute this kind of behavior to poverty. It's the result of individuals who were clearly never raised the right way and possess absolutely no moral compass.
To be fair, only a minority of Blacks engage in this kind of behavior, but the bigger issue is that Blacks are so disproportionately overrepresented in this sort of thing that it's hard for people to ignore the optics. The fact that so many of the offenders are youths also raises serious questions about the state of the Black family in large American cities.
Malcolm Gladwell points out that many types of crime follow a power law distribution whereby a handful of top offenders account for a vastly disproportionate share of the total crime. There's a definitely a targeted approach for combating these crimes that we're not adopting because we're unwilling to crack down hard on a small group of individuals. Instead, we'd rather let a much larger group of people be stigmatized by the unlawful behavior of the minority of bad apples. That sort of moral arithmetic never made much sense to me.
You might take a look at "The Moynihan Report: The Negro Family, a case for national action."
Written in 1965. It was bad then, it has gotten worse. There is no way to turn this around. Blacks and leftist whites can come up with more excuses than you have solutions. After 60 years, this is as good as it gets.
I haven't read The Moynihan Report and am certainly no expert on how things were back in 1965, but my impression is that the disparity in social outcomes between blacks and whites has widened since then. Glenn and John frequently make this point and others like Thomas Sowell do as well, that much of the relative deterioration of Black Americans has been post the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
For instance, the Black out of wedlock birth rate was only around 25% when Moynihan published his report back in 1965, but it's over 70% today. Even if disparities between Blacks and whites have always existed, the relative gaps have widened since the 1960s and the cultural changes wrought since then have clearly impacted Blacks more. I disagree that this is as good as it gets, because the data suggests that African Americans were significantly less dysfunctional when American society was more traditional.
Slavery was certainly a stain upon the ideals of this nation, but I would argue that whites today telling Blacks that all of their woes are due to racism is probably one of the most pernicious harms inflicted by one group of people upon another, because its deleterious effects are far more insidious and far less overt. There's no way that Blacks would get a pass for this kind of behavior if the country was majority Asian and suffused with a Confucian ethos.
I just saw some of the videos online and they're truly shocking. It's very disheartening that a minority of individuals have so drastically reduced the quality of life in so many major American cities.
Ever since I returned from my trip to Japan earlier this year I've been lamenting why we can't have nice things in this country. This is clearly one of the reasons, although certainly not the only one. I guess I question whether or not I'm a bad person for feeling such resentment towards the minority of bad apples in this country who wreak such disproportionate chaos.
There's no way that anyone can attribute this kind of behavior to poverty. It's the result of individuals who were clearly never raised the right way and possess absolutely no moral compass.
This behavior has become black privilege.
To be fair, only a minority of Blacks engage in this kind of behavior, but the bigger issue is that Blacks are so disproportionately overrepresented in this sort of thing that it's hard for people to ignore the optics. The fact that so many of the offenders are youths also raises serious questions about the state of the Black family in large American cities.
Malcolm Gladwell points out that many types of crime follow a power law distribution whereby a handful of top offenders account for a vastly disproportionate share of the total crime. There's a definitely a targeted approach for combating these crimes that we're not adopting because we're unwilling to crack down hard on a small group of individuals. Instead, we'd rather let a much larger group of people be stigmatized by the unlawful behavior of the minority of bad apples. That sort of moral arithmetic never made much sense to me.
Yeah, and the BLM riots were "mostly peaceful". Sheesh, catch a clue!
You might take a look at "The Moynihan Report: The Negro Family, a case for national action."
Written in 1965. It was bad then, it has gotten worse. There is no way to turn this around. Blacks and leftist whites can come up with more excuses than you have solutions. After 60 years, this is as good as it gets.
I haven't read The Moynihan Report and am certainly no expert on how things were back in 1965, but my impression is that the disparity in social outcomes between blacks and whites has widened since then. Glenn and John frequently make this point and others like Thomas Sowell do as well, that much of the relative deterioration of Black Americans has been post the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
For instance, the Black out of wedlock birth rate was only around 25% when Moynihan published his report back in 1965, but it's over 70% today. Even if disparities between Blacks and whites have always existed, the relative gaps have widened since the 1960s and the cultural changes wrought since then have clearly impacted Blacks more. I disagree that this is as good as it gets, because the data suggests that African Americans were significantly less dysfunctional when American society was more traditional.
Slavery was certainly a stain upon the ideals of this nation, but I would argue that whites today telling Blacks that all of their woes are due to racism is probably one of the most pernicious harms inflicted by one group of people upon another, because its deleterious effects are far more insidious and far less overt. There's no way that Blacks would get a pass for this kind of behavior if the country was majority Asian and suffused with a Confucian ethos.